Hélène
He was not a GI, only a noisy ebullient History Professor enjoying some sort of sabbatical interlude in the beautiful city of Paris. Except for this detail though, our encounter, soon followed by my departure from the beautiful city to start a new life in the United States, resembles a post World World II romance. Not the most likely script for a member of a feminist periodical who swore she fancied living in a city or in the countryside but never, never in a suburb.
Forty years later, here we are in a house we love, with a yard where we grow weeds, flowers and vegetables (in that order). We have a daughter, now in her thirties, who lives in California. My husband is still doing research and writing about Carnival and Carnival-like festivities in Europe and the Americas, past and present. He retired in 2002. Throughout the years since I immigrated to the United States I have taught French and between 1997 and 2012 I was involved in collaborative oral history projects in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, a story too long to detail.

Sam and Hélène
So what kind of people are we, what do we like to do?   We like to start the morning  with Paul Abel’s Latin jazz on the radio, breakfasting with a semi-dance. We like to recite poetry, we watch movies on Saturday evenings with a friend, we listen to NPR, the BBC, Democracy Now and France Culture. We love to cook. We hate to take care of all the practical and administrative tasks that proliferate like cancerous cells and we are always late in doing it. We garden. We spend time with friends, physically or  electronically. Sam still plays tennis. Helen reads a lot, works at keeping alive parts of her life in France and walks and does her stretches when she finds the time. We like to reflect and speculate about all sorts of things. We like camping. We are concerned with what’s happening here and in the world, especially about the destruction of the natural world; we can’t be as active as we were at a younger age but we do our best to support a number of organizations we believe in. 

And now we are embarking on this new cohousing adventure. We look forward to the joys and irritations of daily interactions with our cohousing partners; to sharing pleasures and concerns, theirs and ours, from meals taken together to other projects and activities that will develop organically. We like that the people in this group are diverse, in their life experiences and ages. We are very impressed to see that the process by which decisions are made by consensus works as efficiently as it does. We can feel that there is a lot of trust and how much it helps that the developer who oversees the construction of the building is one of us. At our breakfast table the two of us sometimes discuss utopian ideas. What about finding ways to share a few cars so that some of us don’t even have to own a car anymore? What about a poetry group? Collective composting of all our food related waste? All of that is for later days though. Right now our building is rising and our group’s energies are focused on the tasks at hand. We are happy to participate in this project. In the present period when all sorts of forces push us collectively toward isolation and helplessness, more than ever, communities matter.